


i didn't know i had a dream (didn't know until i saw you)

by moonbeatblues



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, and loving ayda, bro we are just projecting, featuring more discussion about bass than initially anticipated, writing ayda is so nice because that's just. my brain. on paper. no filter.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:41:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24422206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: “I have feelings for Figueroth— Fig. Your friend. Your best friend. Mine too, transitively. Romantic ones. What do you think about that?”It takes a second. It always does, when she gets like this. Garthy says that she always says the things she needs to, that’s not the problem, just that they end up in a different order than people are expecting.
Relationships: Adaine Abernant & Ayda Aguefort, Ayda Aguefort/Figueroth Faeth
Comments: 4
Kudos: 114





	i didn't know i had a dream (didn't know until i saw you)

**Author's Note:**

> my brain is. too fried to talk about this but. temperature as a vehicle for discussions of overstimulation?? for a character who literally would feel like everyone around her is colder? good shit. i have so many half-baked ideas about fig and ayda and instead of fleshing them out, i've interspersed them with infodumping about the double bass. it's what ayda would do
> 
> (title is from come into the water by mitski)

“I have feelings for Figueroth— Fig. Your friend. Your best friend. Mine too, transitively. Romantic ones. What do you think about that?”

It takes a second. It always does, when she gets like this. Garthy says that she always says the things she needs to, that’s not the problem, just that they end up in a different order than people are expecting. 

(A different order, like being the mother of your friend, and then being looked after by them. She wonders how that Ayda managed, how she’s supposed to ever navigate the feelings that the version of her that came before felt for this person, how they’re the same and how they aren’t. Then, she remembers writing the contract.

She started writing it on Leviathan, is the part she won’t tell Fig. The _no inferences_ part— that had been the first thing. She wasn’t sure what exactly it was she would be telling Fig, just that it was something that needed to exist outside of herself. 

There was a girl who used to come to the library— she had long hair, dark and silky, and she kept needing the books Ayda was reading. _We can read them together_ , she’d said, and that wasn’t how Ayda understood books to be, but something about the funny color in that girl’s eyes made her want to say yes.

She’d felt this roaring thing in her chest all at once when they’d both reached to turn the page at once and their fingers had brushed. Her hand was so cold it hurt to touch, but she found herself wanting to feel it again. She’d never felt that before, wanting to lean towards pain. It was strange, anomalous, she knew; she drew her hand back and let the girl turn the page. Her eyes tracked all over the next words, and didn’t take in a single one.

It occurred later that she might have hurt that girl, as well. That it might have been the reason she didn’t come back to the library again, or perhaps that she found another girl to read with, maybe one who understood the idea of reading together— she still doesn’t, you see. Or maybe she died. It was a pirate island.

(She’d had to read the whole book again— nothing had permeated beyond that feeling. A previous Ayda would have called the venture a waste.)

She’d never gotten to ask about the roaring. The sound it made, in her ears— blood, probably, or fire, or both, a previous Ayda said her body didn’t much differentiate between the two— is just like the feedback of Fig’s bass when she casts something. That's how she decides that she’ll tell her, because the thrum of the note Fig plays passes through her like the chill of another’s cold hand, and when it’s over she realizes it’s the same sound as in her head. It means something, she’s sure. She wants it so badly to mean something. She needs it to exist so badly she wishes she was a conjurer, just for a moment.)

It takes a moment. She waits.

“Well,” Adaine says, and schools her eyebrows back to a more reasonable level above her eyes, “at least you’re not a middle-aged man.”

“No, I am not,” she says. “Should I be? I do not want to be. Is that what she wants?”

“No, no,” Adaine waves her hand through the air almost desperately. “It was a joke.” Adaine Abernant is a kind soul— she looks at her after a moment, earnest and open, not like the Elven Oracle or even the Oracle for all of Spyre, but like a friend. “I don’t think she’s really thought about what she wants, but I hope when she does she finds out it’s you. You’re a good person to want.”

“Oh.”

She bursts into tears, of course.

“And you’re made of fire, too! Fig likes fire.”

“Yes.” She presses the back of her hand to her cheek. “That is very fortunate.”

(Fig’s hand slips into hers and squeezes, and she starts crying again. There's something to be said for reveling in a difference of temperature, but Fig isn’t cold, in the lattice of their fingers, and the relief she feels at it surprises her, both in presence and intensity.

“Huh,” Fig says. She’s close to unconsciousness— Fig hasn’t said anything about it, but she thinks they are entering the phase of the sleepover where the actual sleep is done.

“What is it?”

“I’ve never— your hand isn’t colder than mine. People’s always are.”

Her heart beats a rising tattoo against her ribs. “Is that bad?”

Fig smiles. Her head falls further against the pillow. “No, it’s— really nice, actually. One of those things you don’t even know you like, or want, until you have it, you know?”

“Yes,” she whispers, and feels hope building in her in this quiet sort of frenzy. “I do know.”)

—

“Do you know about the double bass?”

“Like, the instrument?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, yeah— I think they have a few at Aguefort, in the music department.”

Ayda rolls over to look at her. “I’m sorry.”

Their conversations are like this a lot— Ayda starts from the outside, sometimes. The things she says seem to exist entirely apart from another, and it’s not until Fig responds a few times that she starts to see where they spiral inward, towards something of more singular intention. In her mind’s eye, she starts to wind a thread between them. “For what?”

“You apologized for scrying on me, in the forest.”

There are too many things to envision, in that moment. Ayda, seeing the moment the marilith split from her. Confusing them. Ayda reaching out, in her mind, and finding Fig reaching back, and being afraid. Like looking into a mirror, and finding another reflected in its surface, over and over again, an unending volley of fear and confusion. She tries— she refuses, in that moment, to be lost to it. They’d wished for the same thing, believed the same thing. She chooses to believe it now, to trust.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Did you know there is copper? In your earrings?”

She blinks. Another point to wind the thread around. “No.”

“There were a lot of spells I tried to cast, while I was in the gallery. Divination spells are— well, they’re easier for me. And for detect thoughts, all you need is—”

“Copper.”

“Yes. I did not think it would work, but maybe it’s that you were reaching out to me, and that it was the last thing I tried to cast before you freed me.”

“So, you, uh—” She reaches up, suddenly shy, to scratch at her neck. Tries not to avert her eyes, and fails. “What’d you hear?”

“It’s—” Ayda’s hair flares a bit brighter, in the way she’s learned to read as embarrassment. “Fig, I believe you when you say you want to kiss me. Especially because, you know, you usually do after you say it. I just— I had never heard it like that. People think different things than they say, and it’s terrifying to think about, because I cannot— it’s already so hard to tell, when people talk to me. I don’t particularly like that spell, I don’t think I will use it again unless I have to, especially because Adaine gave me a much better one, but knowing you were thinking the same things that you say, the same things that you do, it is. Hard to explain, how it made me feel.”

She hazards a guess. “Incredible?”

“Yes,” Ayda says, immediately. “Incredible. Cool. Tight.”

She leans forward to kiss her— never sparing in intensity. Fig was never a religious kid— watching Kristen go through her whole thing sort of gave her the experience in miniature, and she hasn’t even begun to broach the idea that an archdevil is something people could believe in, that Hell is a metaphysical thing as much as a place. But, she thinks, as best as she knows, that Ayda kisses like prayer. Fervent, quiet, focused. All the things she believes, and hopes, brought to the forefront.

Her hands curl in Fig’s shirt and loosen again, and Fig wraps her fingers lazily along the curve of Ayda’s neck.

“What about the double bass?”

“Oh,” Ayda says, “Yes. I think it was something from earlier, from when you were— in the forest, but you said something about bass, and solos.”

Her throat closes a bit. The thread winds. “Right.”

“Every time you play at a concert venue, there are more people in the room than I have ever met in my life. All in the same place, for you. I do not know how much help it is— to hear it from me, that is, even if we are paramours— but I think the bass is a very good solo instrument.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know how to describe it— it sounds like, like something inside of me. It sounds like how I feel.”

It’s hard to keep hold of the thread, when Ayda says things like that. “God, uh, okay. Cool.”

“Yes.” Ayda nods, head shifting along the pillow. “Cool. Tight.”

“So,” and she reminds herself that a spiral circles itself, to reach the center. “The double bass.”

“The double bass,” Ayda says, voice shifting into the flat, confident tone of Research Ayda, conveying information diligently collected. “Is like another version of the bass guitar— the predecessor, actually. It's used in orchestral settings, and sometimes jazz. It’s much larger, and has a different tone, but is tuned the same way. It would not be so difficult, to switch between them, though it seems that bow technique can take a long time to learn, and there are different styles of even holding it— the Fallinel bow style is the more widely accepted version, though I suppose that is reason enough not to use it—”

“You think I should play the double bass instead?”

“Oh,” Ayda says. “I see. I have led you to a misconception. I think you should do exactly what you want, Fig. I just— I wanted to find solos, for the bass, for you. Or, at least, proof that people want to hear them, enough to write them. People that aren’t just me.”

And just like that, the thread reaches the center. Fig smiles, and ties it off, crowds a little further into Ayda’s space so her wing reflexively curls out and across her. “You know what’s funny?”

“What is funny?”

“The thing that got me to leave the van so Aelwyn could escape, it was hearing you were upset. Because those stupid Kei Lumennura kids told you I, uh, I got around, because I was a rock star, or whatever.”

“Oh,” Ayda blinks. “That seems plausible, actually, I did not fully understand what it meant. If I heard that you were with other people, a lot, before I finished drafting up the contract, I think it would have upset me quite a bit.”

“It’s not a tour,” Fig says, “things need to settle down, but if you want to watch me practice, when we get home or even today, I think that would be cool.”

“This is not something you would normally do?”

“No, I always— I learned how to play by myself, in my room, because I didn’t want to see anyone and things were getting— bad, all around me. Even when I practice with Gorgug and everyone, it’s after I finish writing the songs, after I know I can play them.”

“I see.”

“Practicing takes a long time, it’s not as fun, and it kinda hurts, sometimes. But it’s real. Most of music is learning how to do it, performing is just— like a celebration, of all the work. I never really wanted someone to see that part, before, but if you want to, I think I want that.”

Then, they have to take a minute to smother the pillow where it’s caught fire— or rather, Fig does, and Ayda stands and tries to stop her tears from falling on anything else flammable.

“I think—“ Ayda says, thumbing under her eyes and coming away with only sparks. “I think I would like that. I think it would be incredible.”

“Great,” and Fig pulls her down onto the mattress, now pillow-less and covered only with those fancy Kei Lumennura sheets Fabian swears can’t catch fire. Really, they should’ve only had those the whole time. “Cool.”

“Tight,” Ayda supplies, and kisses her again.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @seafleece on tumblr, come say hello!! still working my way through fh season 2, but it has. consumed me.


End file.
